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Basingstoke Magistrates' Court was told that the mother of two had made the false credit agreements between December 2007 and the beginning of March this year.

She told her employers what she had done when she could no longer keep up with the repayments.

Nicholas Bates, defending, said that the crimes had not been committed so that his client could enjoy a "champagne lifestyle", and that the money was used solely to fund her grandmother's treatment.

He added that she had already started to repay the money to her employer.

Prosecutor Linda Jones told the court that Bartlett, who worked as an agent for the firm, had a previous conviction for a similar breach of trust.

Bartlett admitted six counts of submitting false loan applications to Provident Personal Credit, for a total of £2,050.

She also asked the justices to take 12 similar offences into consideration, bringing the total cost of the fraud to £6,297.

She was sentenced to do six months of community service and to remain indoors between 8pm and 7am.

She was also ordered to pay £50 pounds towards court costs.

Speaking outside court, she said: "What I did was awful, but what do you do when you know something works?

"Without Aricept my grandmother was terrified - she was like a toddler who was being attacked."

The Alzheimer's Society believes that the £2.50 a day drug should be available on the NHS to sufferers at all stages of the illness.

However, in 2005 the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice), the government's drugs watchdog, recommended that it should only be prescribed to patients with "moderate" Alzheimer's, meaning that thousands of patients have to wait until their disease has progressed before they can access the treatment.

Hampshire Primary Care Trust said its policy is to follow the Nice guidelines and decisions about prescribing the medication lie with consultants.

Martin Robinson, director of operations for older people's mental health services at Hampshire Partnership NHS Trust, said: "We prescribe memory drugs in line with NICE guidance and this includes Aricept, Reminyl and Exelon.

"Normally, this would follow a referral from a patient's GP for specialist assessment and all assessments are based around needs."

Nice says that providing the drug to all Alzheimer's patients, of which there are around 400,000 in Britain, would be too expensive.